John Gu – Crypto Market Making & The Cold Start Problem (S7E30)

My guest today is John Gu, founder and CEO of Caladan, one of the most active market makers in crypto and a firm that has provided liquidity to more than 200 token launches. John's path runs through MIT, AlphaSimplex, Citadel's principal strategies group, and Tower Research before landing in Singapore at the dawn of the ICO era — where what started as a trade on the kimchi premium became the foundation for one of the most active liquidity providers in digital assets.

The thesis of our conversation is what I'll call the cold start problem. In traditional markets, every newly listed stock arrives with scaffolding already in place — a designated market maker, a reference price, a universe of comparables, and decades of regulatory infrastructure. Crypto inverts that. A new token can launch with no orderbook, no comparables, and no clear demand curve. Someone has to quote a two-sided market into that void, and how they do it shapes whether the asset becomes a real, tradable thing — or a graveyard of wide spreads and stranded liquidity.

John and I dig into how you bootstrap liquidity from zero, how the quoting playbook evolves as a market matures, the economics of token market making contracts, and how that same infrastructure now bridges into structured products and treasury solutions for token foundations.

Please enjoy my conversation with John Gu.